Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the 'dark academia' internet aesthetic, which Romanticizes life at early twentieth century college campuses, as a form of counter-curation. Its mood-oriented aesthetics de-historicize the past, which serves the renegotiation of values, community building, and recasts nostalgia.

Paper long abstract:

Dark Academia is an ‘internet aesthetic’, an aesthetic style used in posts on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Tumblr that resonates the atmosphere of life in boarding schools, prep schools and (Ivy League) colleges from the last decades of the nineteenth century up until the 1940s. It expresses a fascination with (neo-)gothic architecture; with tweed, lace, wool, and leather; with literature and art, and Romantic longing. Having been a main trend on social media platforms throughout the coronavirus pandemic, dark academia captures and facilitates cultural engagement in times of social isolation and closed college campuses.

This paper studies the dark academia aesthetic as a form of counter-curation: the deliberate de-historization and eclectic aestheticization of the past counters curatorial norms, and the common ‘detached’ understanding of an objectified past. Using the concept Stimmung (attunement) I will argue that the aim of this internet aesthetic is to annul historical distance by capturing a mood and atmosphere associated with early twentieth-century campuses through the means of curated social media representations. This de-historicization allows for the renegotiation of values, like inscribing queerness - associated with secret queer romantics at gender-divided schools - into its representational language, without having to reassert historical gender binaries. Stimmung also generates a spiritual communality that we might call aesthetic belonging, which has a clear social function in times of social distancing, even while the aesthetic idealizes solitude. Finally, I will challenge the idea that nostalgia necessarily serves escapism into an idealized (objectified) past.